A biased look at psychology in the world

October 29, 2015

A New Look at Fuckology

A new article in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy reviews the book, Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts by Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan (2014). The title of the volume is a rather clever coinage by Money himself, one of the few—and arguably the best—colloquialisms in the nearly endless series of clinical terms he devised during his long career. While a handful of his linguistic inventions became ubiquitous or at least adopted as specialist vernacular the lion’s share was hugely obscure. Perhaps what this collection of critical essays does best is paint a convincing portrait of the contradictions riddling Money's arguments. It also showcases him as a flawed, narcissistic scholar who bent over backward to avoid admitting his errors. Only here, the counterarguments linger a little too self-approvingly over postmodernist explanations of sex and gender instead of Money's "scientistic" conceptions. In a bizarre section in the concluding chapter, for instance, the authors embark on a three-page analytical nitpicking of the "unusual" iambic pentameters of Money’s definition of gender. All in all, however, Fuckology is a revealing look at a deliberately complex mind; it is an upper-level text that will help contemporary scholars understand Money in context.